Nobody's Business

When Will Cops Slap the Cuffs on David Vitter?

Here's a lovely use of local resources.

It was Rocio Palacios who first noticed the woman who appeared to need help. It was 8 a.m. when she and her husband, Erasmo, dropped their 6-year-old daughter off at school and had picked up their 22-year-old daughter to go out for breakfast when they saw the woman waving her arms at 53rd and Kedzie last November. The couple laughed, realizing this wasn't a woman in distress after all. 

Rather, the arm-waving woman was a streetwalker. Or at least, pretending to be one.

[W]ithin seconds, Chicago Police swarmed the family car, hauling Erasmo Palacios out in handcuffs. He was charged with solicitation of a prostitute. ... Eight hours later, Palacios, who has no criminal record, was released from custody. And weeks later, charges against him were dropped. 

Wow. So we have an undercover police officer dressed like a hooker, and "swarms" of colleagues standing by to entrap and arrest those who even appear to succumb to her lure.

It's puzzling enough that you can get arrested for a 'crime' in which no one gets hurt, and that's entirely consensual. But it's a full-bore plunge through the looking glass that the cops will still slap the cuffs on you even if you neither planned nor committed anything of that nature.

Speaking of nature: there's a reason why prostitution is called the 'oldest profession.' It's an ineradicable phenomenon, and twenty or thirty centuries of waging Wars on Whores (and often their johns) hasn't done one whit to lessen the so-called problem.

In a sane society, prostitution would be legal. Legalizing commercial sex between consenting adults would provide surefire boons to public health and safety (workers can get medically tested without fear of arrest, for one thing); and it would provide communities with substantial income tax revenues, instead of saddling them with endless law-enforcement expenditures (including the taxpayer money spent on such preposterous police shenanigans as the Palacios arrest).

The other thing that pisses me off no end is that Wars on Whores, just like Wars on Drugs, almost invariably end up targeting citizens at the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder — especially minorities. Given Chicago's diverse ethnic and demographic makeup, it's astonishing how few local middle-class white people are arrested on prostitution charges. Just take a look at this little photo gallery that the Chicago PD, with all the restraint of a nya-nyaing frat boy, maintains on its website. What, white guys don't fuck? They don't visit prostitutes? (For evidence to the contrary, you could think back to John Profumo, and Jimmy Swaggart, and Ted Haggard, and on and on. None of them went to jail for their sexual exploits.)

If Erasmo Palacios and all the sad, disheveled men on that web page allegedly committed an arrestable crime (though they're innocent until proven guilty), how about a guy who only recently confessed in public that he'd been to a prostitute? What do you reckon the chances are that DC cops will "swarm" Senator David Vitter's tony residence, handcuff him, and haul him to the paddy wagon in front of his wife and kids?

If you said 'nil,' you're on to something.

[thanks, Bill!]

Old and Horny People: You're Not Alone

Good take on the Larry Craig affair by To the People blogger Leonardo:

As I stroll into middle-age it is encouraging that a guy that old is still so horny that he can't control himself at a public toilet.

Cloud, meet silver lining.

Sinking to a New Bottom

These students are, for want of a better term, asshats. But they've already been dealt with by their university, and it's hard to see what motives the Federal government has to issue  warrants for their arrest, other than, of course, politics and extreme peevishness.

Moon Karl Rove, and you'll be arrested. When the politico spoke on American University's campus in April, he was met by a throng of angry Democratic students' behinds as they dropped trou and blocked Rove's motorcade. Most of the kids were given 40 hours of community service by the university, but on Friday, the cheeky group was notified that the Secret Service has issued warrants for their arrest. Details are bare, but the students are reportedly being charged with crossing a police line and disorderly conduct.

[Thanks, Anita!]

Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly

There's an awfully transparent sleight of hand in this editorial about the unintended consequences of raising the minimum wage.

Nationally, the percentage of unemployed teens recently increased to 3 1/2 times the overall unemployment rate, the highest it's been in nine months. Is it just a coincidence that over that same nine-month period there were 16 state-level minimum wage hikes, including a 6 percent boost in New York?

Interesting yardstick, nine months. Let's see, nine months ago, that was just after last summer. Meaning, just after teen employment rates dropped, as they do every year when the season's over and teens go back to school.

That noted, I can't quibble with the gist of the piece. The road to hell is lined with do-gooders who wouldn't know about the immutable law of the market if it slapped them upside their thick heads.

Economic research has shown time and again that increasing the minimum wage destroys jobs for low-skilled workers while doing little to address poverty. And testimony from employers across the country confirms that it wreaks havoc on the summer job market. The classic summer jobs — cashier, restaurant waiter, grocery clerk — can help an employer with increased service or fill in for full-time employees taking vacations or sick leave. When the minimum wage gets boosted, however, employers hold off on hiring teens to fill those slots. Most of the work still gets done. But customers may get stuck standing in longer lines. And teens lose out because they're stuck at home watching reruns of "The Price Is Right."

What's more, low-skilled positions have high turnover rates, so employers spend unusually large amounts of time and money training new people to fill them. The higher minimum wage makes that training more expensive. For many employers, it's no longer worth it to keep hiring. 

Whole thing here.

Dorothy Makes Lots of Friends in the GOP

Ted Haggard. Mark Foley. Bob Allen.

And now, Larry Craig.

Roll Call newspaper reported Monday that Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho was apprehended June 11 by a plainclothes police officer investigating complaints of lewd behavior in an airport men's room. ... Craig, 62, paid a $500 fine when he entered his guilty plea on August 8 in Hennepin County Municipal Court in Bloomington, Minnesota, according to state criminal records. ...

According to Roll Call, the arresting officer alleged that Craig lingered outside a rest room stall where the officer was sitting, then entered the stall next door and blocked the door with his luggage. According to the arrest report cited by Roll Call, Craig tapped his right foot, which the officer said he recognized "as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct." The report alleges Craig then touched the officer's foot with his foot and the senator "proceeded to swipe his hand under the stall divider several times," according to Roll Call.

Lovely. That's four cases of smut-fighting, morally superior, adamantly heterosexual, family-promoting, hard-right Christian Republican leaders who love taking it up the ass from male prostitutes, or who sexually proposition young boys in their charge, or who offer blowjobs to complete strangers in some public crapper. Four cases in the space of less than a year.

Not that there's a pattern here or anything.

Poster Girl

You gotta wonder why people who've just committed multiple acts of vandalism, who've destroyed the property of others, and who've just engaged in public censorship, would freely talk to a news team about their exploits.

Especially when what they're reacting to what is obviously a hoax. Especially after they've been told it's a hoax. In my book, that makes them vandals, censors, and certifiable idiots all rolled into one.

I'd skulk away in shame, but not these folks. How proudly the Sarah Heywoods of the world face reporters' microphones!

Advertisements for an unusual children's adventure camp where kids could learn to throw grenades outraged passersby on Toronto streets Tuesday. The posters turned out to be part of an ad campaign by a charity group promoting aid and awareness for child soldiers and children affected by war. ... Some Torontonians didn't realize the blue, tree-motif posters were a hoax. Sarah Heywood told CBC News that she flew into a rage when she saw the ads on Queen Street West. She said she was so upset that she ripped down all the Camp Okutta signs that she encountered during the afternoon, "until my fingers were actually sore from tearing at the tape and ripping them off."

Nannies have neither shame nor remorse, only the burning desire — make that the unnegotiable demand — that others conform to their exact sensibilities. They'll go to any lengths to bring about their goals, even if it means committing crimes and misdemeanors, and even if it means their puny intellects will be on display for all to laugh at.

I know that their self-important rages and their unchecked totalitarian impulses ought to amuse me, but mostly, the ever-swelling ranks of these neighborhood stormtroopers just scare the living daylights out of me.

Oh Ye of Little Faith

Who'd have guessed that Christopher Hitchens and Mother Theresa had something in common after all — the notion that God doesn't exist?

Faking your faith for 50 years — now that's an accomplishment worthy of sainthood.

Hey, Your Bong Water's In My Waste Water

Shocking. Stunning. Horrifying. The favorite adjectives of Nanny Staters were once again tossed around like confetti when it emerged the other day that cocaine use among Londoners is perhaps 16 times higher than the government had assumed. A team of scientists concluded as much after examining the chemicals in the city's sewage water (a stoner might justifiably refer to this method as "some serious shit, man").

Tests found that 37,638 doses of cocaine, or 150,552 lines, are consumed in London every day, nearly 16 times more than the government figure of 2,397 doses. 

Shocking! Stunning! Horrif— Wait a minute.

London has a population of seven and a half million. 37,000-plus daily doses of cocaine means that one in 200 Londoners — one half of one percent — does a little blow on any given day. Sounds pretty un-alarming to me. But if you're a sky-is-falling public-health fuddy-duddy, given to hand-wringing and cries of moral anguish, this news is surely all you need to go into overdrive.

Still, what exactly is the problem here?

Inasmuch as cocaine use leads to increased crime, that's a consequence of drug prohibition and the criminal elements that black markets (with their built-in sky-high profits) inevitably attract.

And the public-health picture? You know, coke users seem to take care of themselves pretty well. The Independent reported last year that slightly fewer than 100 Britons die each year from the use of cocaine. That means that purely statistically, correlated to the U.K.'s population of 60 million, London sees about 12 coke deaths annually — maybe 20 to 25 if you reckon that the swinging capital probably attracts an outsized share of partygoers and risktakers.

Just to add a bit of perspective: Those roughly two dozen fatalities are almost certainly much lower than the number of local deaths caused by entirely legal prescription drugs.

Told about the cocaine levels in London's waste water,

A spokeswoman from the Home Office insisted: "Tackling drugs remains one of the Government's highest priorities and is backed with record investment." 

A "record investment." You don't say. Somebody ought to ask what kind of investment it is when you pump millions of pounds into a holy cause year after year, only to get unfailingly negative returns. (As the Telegraph article points out, albeit unironically: cocaine use is up, and the drug is now almost half as cheap as it was seven years ago.)

Truth be known, I don't like cocaine — I mean, this guy I know doesn't like it. This guy I know tried it once, and between the worrisome heart palpitations and the unpleasant, hard-edged mood it induced, he didn't care for it one whit.

Plus, unlike marijuana, cocaine has serious addictive properties.

But you know what? So does booze. So does tobacco. And between them, those two legal drugs kill more people in a week than cocaine does in a year.

Trying to make sense of the drug war is as great a waste of perfectly good brain cells as getting wasted on coke  — or rum-and-Coke, for that matter.

Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part Four

Feel stressed, disgusted, or irritable? It's fair to say that there's no dearth of such emotions among airline passengers. Thankfully, we now all have a strong reason to smile until our jaws hurts, or else. With a tip of the hat to reader Tom Karnofsky for pointing it out, here's Newsweek's Patti Davis, writing on the brave new security state:

It was bound to happen. Now even a frown or grimace can get you into trouble with The Man. "Specially trained security personnel" will be watching passengers for "micro-expressions" that will reveal treacherous agendas and insidious intentions at airports around the country. These agents, who may literally hold your fate in their hands have been given a lofty, Orwellian name: "Behavior Detection Officers." ... The Transportation Security Administration hopes to have as many as 500 Behavior Detection Officers [with the power to detain you, RvB] on the job by the end of 2008.

What a swell idea. Just too bad the government is keeping the deployment of the face police limited to airports. We could surely create a nationwide Stepford — a land of relentless civility and good cheer — if only we had undercover behavior detection officers patrolling our streets, our shops, our schools, our subways, our swap meets, and our sports arenas. Just for starters.

A lot of the Newsweek web commenters are irritated and disgusted with Patti Davis for writing a critical assessment of the new initiative. But no worries: like Davis herself, those grumps and grouches will be whisked away to a secret detention center soon enough.

Maybe that'll teach them to heed my good example:

Headline explanation here. Some guy called Benjamin Franklin weighs in here.

A Drug War and a Toothless Press

Well, this isn't the most eloquent thing I've ever written, but exasperation is the enemy of pretty sentences. And I'm plenty exasperated after reading David Hench's piece in the Portland Press Herald, about the officers of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency who are sure to "make an important dent" in the supply of illicit drugs in the state.

Like too many press articles, especially in regional papers, Hench's piece amounts to an eager verbal back rub of the men he's supposed to cover with a measure of critical thinking and independent thought. So I wrote him a note.

Dear David:

I just read your "Pot Hunt" piece, and I think you missed some questions.

First this: Why would you swallow what the MDEA tells you hook, line, and sinker? Don't you know that at least half of all Mainers are thoroughly sick of the drug war, and with good reason? Does that not provide you with enough legitimate incentive to insert just a little bit of critical reporting into your articles?

The police team spends a day in the woods and comes home with a haul of 99 plants. That's considered success? You allow them to describe that as "pretty effective" without asking them a couple of follow-up questions? Huh.

Why not make a quick evaluation of the finances involved? That's taxpayer money, you know. Yours and mine. Sending search teams on a wild goose chase costs how much? Sending helicopters up in the air to look for a supposedly telltale shade of green costs what, exactly — let's say, on a yearly basis? Other than the officers themselves and some tough-on-crime showboating politicians, who would consider the uprooting of a few handfuls of plants a wise use of a veritable mountain of community funds?

Who was the genius who blurbed the story on Friday's or Saturday's front page, and wrote that the MDEA "knew" they stood to make a difference — a real "dent", even — in the availability of pot in the state? Really? They've been fighting this drug war for the better part of a century, and there's no indication illicit drug use is down. On the contrary. How are the DEA and the ONDCP and their ilk making a dent, exactly? An "important" dent at that, in your words!

Why do reporters time and again let these folks get away with this duplicitous crap — wanting their cake and eating it too? I mean, year after year, professional drug warriors justify their chosen profession by claiming that drug use is at excessive and dangerous levels. And then they contend that they're pretty damn successful in fighting it. So which is it?

You write that marijuana "can contribute to depression and lead to decreased cognitive function and motivation." It's debatable to what degree marijuana does this, but what isn't debatable is that alcohol leads to these same things in much higher numbers. Now, David, let me ask you this: When's the last time you went on a "Booze Hunt" with a team of ATF agents in search of illegal distilleries? Oh, that's right, alcohol isn't illegal.

And there's the rub: You want to talk about "decreased cognitive function"? I see plenty of that in McKinney's statement that "[Pot is] the most abused drug in the nation after alcohol, and Maine is no exception." So why is it OK for him to go after the number-two drug but leave the number-one drug alone? That's a cognitive disconnect of mindsplitting proportions. I'll bet Mr. McKinney goes home at night and knocks back a few cold beers, or a couple of bourbons, and feels really good about himself. But you didn't ask him about that. Or if you did, that regrettably didn't make it into the article.

Prohibition doesn't work, as this country found out in the 1920s and 30s. As soon as alcohol became legal again, the murder rate plummeted, and public health improved because people weren't drinking themselves blind on moonshine and turpentine anymore. And yet reports like yours make it seem like prohibition is a fine and just and halfway successful strategy.

Finally, in whose book it is OK to publish an article like yours without presenting the other side, however cursory? If you need the phone numbers of a couple of drug policy reform groups — the Drug Policy Alliance, Reconsider, NORML, and what have you — I'd be most happy to provide them.

Best wishes,

Rogier van Bakel

To be fair, when a reporter writes about drugs, he or she is is under no obligation to get into the history of the drug war. Habitually parsing the differences between the nation's drug policies versus alcohol policies shouldn't be a requirement either. But simply getting the other side of the story, come on, that's journalism 101; and working in some numbers about the cost and effectiveness of a taxpayer-financed agency is journalism 102.

Asking critical, informed questions would be journalism 103, but I'd be pretty stoked if David Hench and his fellow reporters began showing signs of having completed even just the prior two courses with a modicum of comprehension.